Fire destroyed the Merkaz HaTorah Jewish secondary school in
the Paris suburb of Gagny in the Seine-Saint-Denis region on
Shabbos in the morning at 3am. There were no injuries.
The head of the Merkaz HaTorah institutions is HaRav Yehuda
Toledano. The destroyed building was being renovated and the
students are temporarily studying elsewhere. The destroyed
building was scheduled to reopen in two months.
Fire started simultaneously in two separate places on the
first floor of the school. A primary school and a
kindergarten for 200 children were to be inaugurated there in
January 2004.
The size of the fire can be gauged from the fact that 100
firefighters were called in to put out the flames, which
destroyed some 3,000 square meters on the school's second
floor.
France's Minister of Interior Nicolas Sarkozy and Minister of
Education Luc Ferry visited the remnants of the building on
Saturday. They were met by dozens of people from the local
Jewish community.
"The criminal origin of the blaze is more than strongly
suspected which gives, for this Jewish school, an antisemitic
and obviously racist connotation," said Interior Minister
Nicolas Sarkozy. "One should not hesitate to mention the
concept of antisemitism. When one sets fire to a Jewish
school, it is hard not to see it as an antisemitic act."
"This shows that there is still lots of work to do to fight
against all forms of antisemitism," the minister added.
He vowed that those who set the fire would be caught and
punished "with the greatest severity."
The Merkaz Hatorah school has some 160 junior high school
students and 60 students in the high school.
No antisemitic messages were found on the walls of the
buildings.
